Robert Rouse - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Robert Rouse
Choice Reviews Online, 2014
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain
Selim Journal of the Spanish Society For Medieval English Language and Literature Revista De La Sociedad Espanola De Lengua Y Literatura Inglesa Medieval, 2000
Arthuriana, 2013
This article considers the literary deployment of the ruins of Caerleon within the Itinerarium Ca... more This article considers the literary deployment of the ruins of Caerleon within the Itinerarium Cambriae of Gerald of Wales. In describing the city, Gerald significantly notes both its Galfridian status as an Arthurian rival to Rome and the Roman origins of the city itself. Read in the context of Gerald’s own re-reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, the episode reveals Gerald’s deployment of an Arthurian past and place as commentary upon the present colonial space of Wales. (RR)
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2016
Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts
"&am... more "'‘What can we know of the world? What quantity of space can our eyes hope to take in between our birth and our death? How many square centimetres of Planet Earth will the soles of our feet have touched?’ As Georges Perec observes, our personal experience of the world is lamentably finite. As much – or as little – as one seeks to travel, one will never experience the entire world. The only way we can know the world outside of our personal experience is necessarily at a remove. Our geographical knowledge of the overwhelming majority of the world is thus mediated through text, image, narrative. No less true for the modern age, this was particularly the case during the medieval period, where the geographical radii of peoples’ lives, as well as their exposure to geographical media, were commonly more restricted than today. However, just as we today experience the world through National Geographic, travel shows and the aspirational reading of Lonely Planet guidebooks, the people of the medieval period also revelled in travel narratives. In the Auchinleck manuscript narrative of Guy of Warwick, the eponymous protagonist travels throughout Europe, from Warwick to Normandy, through Spain, Germany, Lombardy and thence onwards to more exotic locales such as Constantinople, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Alexandria. His travels chart his development as first a chivalric and later a Christian hero, transforming him from an ideal lover-knight into the embodiment of the pious martial pilgrim. But these places are not simply an arbitrary series of stages through which the romance hero moves. They represent real places, more or less familiar to the text’s audience. As much as it is a narrative of the development of the ideal knight, the romance also participates in the articulation of geographical knowledge. For the medieval audience of these romances, what did these places represent What did the act of journeying to them or through them signify How were these distant and dimly-known cities and lands given meaning by the texts in which they were narrated? Through an analysis of the way in which geography is deployed in Guy of Warwick, I hope to frame both a series of questions and a methodological approach through which to explore the important role that medieval romance plays within the medieval English geographical imagination....'"
Choice Reviews Online, 2014
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain
Selim Journal of the Spanish Society For Medieval English Language and Literature Revista De La Sociedad Espanola De Lengua Y Literatura Inglesa Medieval, 2000
Arthuriana, 2013
This article considers the literary deployment of the ruins of Caerleon within the Itinerarium Ca... more This article considers the literary deployment of the ruins of Caerleon within the Itinerarium Cambriae of Gerald of Wales. In describing the city, Gerald significantly notes both its Galfridian status as an Arthurian rival to Rome and the Roman origins of the city itself. Read in the context of Gerald’s own re-reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, the episode reveals Gerald’s deployment of an Arthurian past and place as commentary upon the present colonial space of Wales. (RR)
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2016
Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts
"&am... more "'‘What can we know of the world? What quantity of space can our eyes hope to take in between our birth and our death? How many square centimetres of Planet Earth will the soles of our feet have touched?’ As Georges Perec observes, our personal experience of the world is lamentably finite. As much – or as little – as one seeks to travel, one will never experience the entire world. The only way we can know the world outside of our personal experience is necessarily at a remove. Our geographical knowledge of the overwhelming majority of the world is thus mediated through text, image, narrative. No less true for the modern age, this was particularly the case during the medieval period, where the geographical radii of peoples’ lives, as well as their exposure to geographical media, were commonly more restricted than today. However, just as we today experience the world through National Geographic, travel shows and the aspirational reading of Lonely Planet guidebooks, the people of the medieval period also revelled in travel narratives. In the Auchinleck manuscript narrative of Guy of Warwick, the eponymous protagonist travels throughout Europe, from Warwick to Normandy, through Spain, Germany, Lombardy and thence onwards to more exotic locales such as Constantinople, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Alexandria. His travels chart his development as first a chivalric and later a Christian hero, transforming him from an ideal lover-knight into the embodiment of the pious martial pilgrim. But these places are not simply an arbitrary series of stages through which the romance hero moves. They represent real places, more or less familiar to the text’s audience. As much as it is a narrative of the development of the ideal knight, the romance also participates in the articulation of geographical knowledge. For the medieval audience of these romances, what did these places represent What did the act of journeying to them or through them signify How were these distant and dimly-known cities and lands given meaning by the texts in which they were narrated? Through an analysis of the way in which geography is deployed in Guy of Warwick, I hope to frame both a series of questions and a methodological approach through which to explore the important role that medieval romance plays within the medieval English geographical imagination....'"